Companies conducting litigation face exhaustive legal discovery requests that require the collection of substantial amounts of electronic data, including user-created and/or user-modified files located on the hard drives of their employees' computers. Collecting this data is a time-consuming and labor intensive process that disrupts the employees' workday and often inconveniences those managing the collection process. Current methods require that the employee herself, or another individual on behalf of the employee, be responsible for the collection process by running certain software on the employee's computer. Because the employee will necessarily have notice of the collection, and indeed will determine when to begin the collection, the possibility exists that the employee could alter or delete the files on the computer before beginning the collection process, a practice which requires controls to reduce its frequency of occurrence.
In terms of the actual collection process, current solutions, once installed and initialized by the employee, copy files directly from the computer's local storage, uploading the resulting copies to a server to be compiled in anticipation of responding to the discovery request. During the period of copying and uploading, which can be several hours or more, the files being copied are unavailable to the employee and the processing capability of the computer and the available bandwidth are materially degraded, rendering the computer virtually unusable during the collection process. Files may also become corrupted if they are modified, opened or otherwise used while they are being collected. This period of inability to use the computer and its files not only leads to lost productivity of the employee, it also creates an obstacle for the discovery management personnel attempting to persuade employees to run the software and collect the files on their computers.
In addition, collections that are attempted over virtual private networks are inherently unreliable when using these known tools. If the network connection is interrupted, the entire process must often be restarted, adding to even greater periods of lost employee productivity. In conclusion, it is apparent that the commercial products utilized by many companies today and other known electronic discovery solutions are ill-equipped to adapt to an employee's work requirements, avoid destruction and/or corruption of discoverable data, handle interruptions, whether caused by the employee or by outages of connectivity, and operate remotely within a defined network. Therefore, there is a need for an electronic discovery system and tool that retains greater control over the collection process by operating remotely at the discretion of a manager, minimizes disruption of an employee's workday, and allows an employee to retain substantial use of her computer during collection.
Moreover, current collections mechanisms are deployed as conventional applications. As such, the user of the computing device from which collection id to occur is required to enter their credentials, such as username and passcode, to log-on to the computing device as a means of initiating the data collection application. This means that the electronic discovery/data collection entity may not or may have difficulty collecting the data from the computing device if the user is no longer available, due to termination, resignation, or the like. In addition, the electronic discovery/data collection entity is unable to covertly collect the data, unbeknownst to the device user, as required for certain collections, such as investigations or the like. Therefore, a need exists to develop apparatus, systems, computer program products and the like that provide for collection of data stored locally without the intervention or availability of the device user.